文本的狂欢世界:诺曼·梅勒作品中的互文性策略解读

The Carnival World of Texts: Intertextuality in Norman Mailer's Biographical Works

面对后现代高科技社会的文学表征危机,美国当代作家诺曼·梅勒积极探索并尝试新的表现策略,创作了美国历史上几个不同凡响的人物的传记,其中最典型的是影星玛莉琳·梦露、杀人犯盖瑞·吉尔莫和李·哈维·奥斯瓦尔德的传记。在这些传记中,梅勒完全打破了传统的传记叙事方式,摘用了大量的剪报、他人的传记文本、他自己先前的文本(小说)、照片、私人信件和日记等文本形式,构成了一个文本的狂欢世界,使读者意识到历史虽然是客观存在,却只能从各式各样的文本踪迹中去了解和感知,从而质疑甚至颠覆了作为宏大叙事的官方历史文本,使历史呈现出文本性和多元性。

Confronting the representational crisis in postmodern techn ological society, Norman Mailer, the contemporary American writer, actively tries some new literary techn iques and creates biographies of some special historical figures. The most prominent ones are thos e of Marilyn Monroe, Gary Gilmore and Lee Harvey Oswald. In these biographies Mailer breaks t hrough the confining conventions of biographical narrative and incorporate newspaper clip pings, other pre-existent biographies, his own published novel, photographs, private letters and diaries into his own writings, and therefore to form a carnival world of texts. This makes the re aders realize that history exists empirically. But in epistemological terms, we can only know them through textual traces, which challenges even subverts the official version of history as grand -narrative and makes history textualized and diversified.